Bradley Cooper and Todd Phillips Wanted for MACK BOLAN
Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to the Mack Bolan book series written by Don Pendleton. The stories revolve around the Bolan character, who is an anti-terrorist operative. The studio is looking to build it as a starring vehicle for Bradley Cooper, and they also want Todd Phillips to come on board to direct it — Cooper and Phillips worked together on the Hangover films. The film will be written by Shane Salerno as soon as he's finished with James Cameron's Avatar 4.
According to Deadline, Salerno said his goal is to make a “relevant, grounded and gritty, real-world, PG-13 action-drama film series" with the elite commando Bolan as its catalyst for a trilogy. This could be a big action franchise for Cooper, who recently played Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in the Clint Eastwood-directed film American Sniper.
Here's some additional information on the books and characters from Wiki:
Mack Bolan, alias The Executioner, is a fictional character who has been serialized in over 600 novels with sales of more than 200 million. Created by Don Pendleton, Bolan made his first appearance on the printed page in 1969's War Against the Mafia. Pendleton wrote thirty-seven other novels featuring Bolan, often referred to as the "Mafia Wars." In 1980, Pendleton sold his rights to the character to Gold Eagle who hired a number of ghostwriters to continue publishing Bolan monthly to satisfy reader demand worldwide. Don Pendleton remained credited as the sole author and supervised these new adventures which took the Bolan character all over the world fighting terrorism. This new series of books featured Bolan as a principled warrior fighting larger-than-life adversaries in the spirit of a tougher American version of James Bond. The demand for the books continued and Gold Eagle began releasing as many as 15 titles annually. In addition, Bolan was "spun off" into several new adventure book series which also carried the Mack Bolan/Don Pendleton names and sold remarkably well. As of 2009, there are more than a dozen Mack Bolan novels published every year worldwide by Gold Eagle Books, a division of Harlequin Books.